Howie Roseman Opens up about His Invisible Year Last Season

Howie Roseman was the main highlight of today’s MMQB article, and there was a lot of good stuff to take out of it. There are still people on the fence with Roseman – with good reason – but nobody can deny he’s made the Eagles more stable and, in the eyes of the players, a more honest team to play for. Roseman’s made a bunch of signings so far this offseason, and he isn’t done yet. He opened up about his year away from his former job, which now is his current job.

And in an underreported illustration that Roseman and the Eagles are big enough—even in the wake of the sudden and disagreeable parting with Kelly—to learn from everything in the football universe, the club decided to keep a huge Kelly hire, sports science czar Shaun Huls, who had some forward-thinking ideas about nutrition and body maintenance.
 
“Chip brought in a lot of great ideas and great people,” said Roseman. “Shaun and sports science are both examples of that.”
 
That says a lot to me—a lot of good—about Roseman. The relationship between him and Kelly soured last year, and Roseman said in our interview Friday that he simply wanted to look forward and not rehash what happened in the Kelly days. But I give him credit for this: Roseman still learned from a man with new ideas and good ideas, even if many of them didn’t bear fruit in Philadelphia, and even if the relationship went south.
 
On Friday, Roseman told me that in his time away from a position of influence with the Eagles last year, he learned about the business of sport and the cultivation and development of players from franchise-runners in the NBA, Major League Baseball, NHL and the English Premier League. That’s right. He said that his time at a British sports seminar last November gave him a chance to learn a lot from some of the power teams in world soccer—Chelsea, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Manchester City—about the importance of character in team-building, and about the skills needed to meld players speaking different languages from different cultures with a team of totally different people.
 
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“That was so valuable,” Roseman said, because player development in sports is of universal importance. “And talking to people in basketball, hockey and baseball helped a lot too. I believe experience is a great teacher. All experiences. In the middle of your career, you can’t often take the time or use the energy to take a step back and really learn about your business. But sometimes that’s the best thing for you in business—to take a step back and learn. I was given that opportunity, and Jeffrey [Lurie, the Eagles’ owner] wanted me to learn as much as I could, and for that I’m grateful. So when this opportunity came up now, I was able to hit the ground running. I’d been thinking about so much of the stuff about building a team.”
 
Roseman said he used exit meetings with players the day after the season ended to tell a few of them how much the Eagles valued them and that the team would try to sign them before free agency began—even some of those whose contracts weren’t up. As a scouting staff, they went through a preliminary draft board and discovered they might get shut out of one of the prime players they wanted. So Roseman went to the Senior Bowl and combine to try to scare up some business about moving up in the first round, and in others. “In the past few drafts,” said Roseman, “often we’d be picking lower in the first round, and we’d just miss out on a guy we had targeted. This year we felt there was a big dropoff after 10 players, so I talked to people about trying to move into the top 10.”

So Roseman basically was able to move into the top 10 and undo the ridiculous Pat Shurmur-led win in North Jersey the last game of the season because he’s been paying reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally close attention to the draft. So does that make you feel any better about the upcoming draft? He basically single-handedly changed the Eagles’ record last season from 7-9 to 6-10.

Roseman also said that they’re looking for a receiver with “deep speed,” something they would have had if Chip Kelly didn’t trade away DeSean Jackson. But, then again, the jury might still be out on that move.

You can read the entire MMQB article here.